


The Marvelous Earth Adventures of the Odinbrood and Friends

by follow_the_sun



Series: Odinbrood Adventures [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Endgame Fix-It, F/F, Found Family, Ikea cryptids, Kid Fic, Kid Hela (Marvel), Kid Loki and Kid Thor (Marvel), M/M, Occasional Moose, Parallel Universes, Post-Endgame, Siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27074617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: Bucky and Steve are better dads than Odin, but nobody could prevent two young Asgardians and a miniature frost giant from getting into trouble.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Odinbrood Adventures [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1348111
Comments: 69
Kudos: 223





	1. The Girl Next Door

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, readers! So since I got a question about this, the plan is for this fic to be basically a series of standalone chapters. It feels like a good time for restful fluff, and while there may be some throughlines, I'm not planning on an overall arc. I'll start a new fic if at some point I feel like jumping into a longer Odinbrood story.

“Okay, kids, before I let you check this place out, I want us to all be clear on the ground rules,” Bucky said, standing on the front porch with his metal hand on the doorknob and the key upright in the lock. “So the first thing, and the _absolutely most important_ thing I want to tell all three of you, is no wandering off without—Thor, where the hell is your brother?”

“Daaaaad,” Thor said, drawing the word out into an exasperated sigh. “He’s right—” Then he turned, realized the hand that had been clutching his brother’s since they got off the shuttle was empty, and, with the weight of all the frustrations of all nine years of his life, said, “Crap.”

“Swear Jar,” Steve said, coming up behind them.

“That’s not fair!” Thor said, reddening. “Dad said one first.”

 _“And_ Dad said that Loki being Loki is an automatic swear jar exemption,” Hela said calmly. “He’s already inside, Dad.”

“Do I want to know either how he got in, or how you knew that?” Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow. “Fine, as soon as I catch him, I’ll go over the rules with him individually,” he said, his tone making it a threat. “But you two, listen up, okay? Rule number one, everybody stays on the property unless they have specific permission to leave it. And rule number two: nobody wanders off or goes _any_ farther from the house than the mailbox without first telling a grownup exactly where you’re going.”

“Oh my God, Dad, we’re not babies,” Hela said.

“No, you’re not,” Bucky agreed, “but you’ve also never lived anywhere but a spaceship and you never had a backyard before, much less seven acres of woods where you could get lost or hurt. I know you guys think you’re invincible because you’re Asgardians, but you’re still Asgardian _kids._ And upstate New York might not be as dangerous as space, but you know what lives up here that we don’t have in space? Bears, cougars, coyotes, and moose, which are a lot bigger than you think they are and might even be able to give Fenris a run for his money. So until we’re all a lot more familiar with the territory, I want to know all of you are within screaming distance at all times, capisce?”

“Yes, Dad,” the kids chorused, Hela with only mild grimacing, Thor with deep reluctance. 

“Okay, good. Moving on: your stuff is already in your rooms. I picked them out based on what I thought you’d all like best, but if any of the three of you want to trade, Steve and I can swap the furniture around for you. But this is rule number three, Thor: the hammer stays in your own bedroom _all the time_ unless you have my or Steve’s permission to take it out. Okay?” Bucky had thought this one out; there was no way he could completely prevent unauthorized flying, but the goal was to make the rules as airtight as possible so that 1) structural damage would hopefully be minimized, and 2) even if Thor pushed the limits, Loki wouldn’t be able to talk him out of any trouble he got into for breaking them. 

“Okay, Dad,” Thor said, and then hesitated. “Wait, any of the three of us? What if Loki wants to switch with Hela and I don’t?”

“That’s the last thing I wanted to tell you, kiddo.” Bucky squatted in front of Thor, bringing himself down to eye level. “Now that we live in a house, you and Loki are gonna have your own bedrooms.”

“No!” Thor said immediately, and loudly. Sometimes Bucky wondered if that whole _god of thunder_ thing didn’t have more to do with the kid’s volume than with his seldom-used Asgardian magic. “We always share a room! I don’t wanna be alone all the time!”

Bucky could’ve effectively ended the argument by telling him, _Loki does,_ but he took a breath instead and steadied himself, prepared to be the bad guy. “Look, kiddo, I know there’s a lot of change happening right now, and even though I think it’s gonna be good for all of us, it’s okay if it’s also scary. But give it a try, okay? We’re only gonna be a couple walls apart, and pretty soon, you’re gonna be old enough to want some privacy. Also, you know, I think you might eventually come to appreciate it when your brother has fewer chances to jump out of nowhere and stab you.”

“He hasn’t stabbed me in a while,” Thor grumbled. 

“Kiddo, although I can’t argue with you that twelve days is technically a _while,_ our goal is for him not to stab you ever, so please give this a shot. You wanna go check out your room now?”

“Yeah.” And like that, the worry lines on Thor’s small forehead cleared, and he was on his way to inspect the house’s interior. Hela shot a glance at Bucky, just long enough to show him a well-practiced and extremely fake look of amused sisterly tolerance, and followed Thor up the stairs.

Which left Bucky free, finally, to sink down on the couch and take a couple of deep breaths. “Wow,” he said, as Steve joined him. “You know, it’s not that I wanna excuse Loki version 1.0 for what he did to New York or anything—”

“But we all might’ve underestimated exactly how much Thor version 1.0 needed to be admired all the time, and what kind of toll that might take on a little brother over a couple thousand years? Yeah.” Steve frowned. “I’ve never met a kid who wouldn’t jump at the chance to have his own room before.”

“Yeah, my A-plus parenting skills have managed to mess up a perfectly good thunder god. Look at him, he’s got anxiety.”

“Okay, now you’re being ridiculous, Buck. He’s a kid; change is scary. Loki is… I don’t want to say a steadying presence exactly, but he’s a constant, anyway. I think that as long as Loki’s around, Thor feels like he can handle anything, even when they’re snipping at each other. I mean, you didn’t exactly hate having a tiny sidekick following you around when we were their age.”

“Mm. You _were_ equal parts a troublemaking pain in my ass and good for my ego,” Bucky concurred. “Still, I think it’d be good for Thor to learn to dial back the protective streak a little, before he turns into a complete fucking idiot like his old man.”

“Now that was a Swear Jar violation,” Steve told him.

“What can I say, Steve? You give me bad habits.”

“Come over here and I’ll give you more than a bad habit.”

“God, a hundred and ten years and your come-ons still haven’t gotten any better than that? It’s a good thing I’m easy,” Bucky said, turning his mouth up for the incoming kiss. “Mm. That’s nice. What do you say we go break in our new bedroom while the kids explore the rest of the house?”

“Don’t you want to keep an eye on them, make sure they don’t go running off into the woods without permission?”

Bucky stared at him. “Rogers, you dummy,” he said, “I’m _counting_ on it.”

Loki loved his dad, and Steve, and his sister, and even his brother, in a slightly more complicated way, but car rides with all of them _and_ Fenris crammed into a single minivan made him feel exceptionally stabby, so he sneaked away almost as soon as the car pulled into the driveway. He wanted to see his bedroom before Thor got there and made it thirty percent less cool by the mere fact of his own existence. So he was the first one to wander through the farmhouse’s living room, with its high beamed ceiling and huge stone fireplace (which he made careful note of as a potential asset, even though Christmas was four months away); first to make his way up the satisfyingly creaky staircase, and first to find his brand new bedroom.

Dad had put his stuff in the room across from Hela’s and next to Thor’s, which had both good and bad points. Technically, it meant his room was closest to Dad and Steve’s, but the master bedroom was down its own little hallway, which was good, because Dad and Steve doing bedroom things: _ew._ Some of the stuff in his room, he was surprised to see, wasn’t from the spaceship, but seemed to be left over from the previous occupants of the house. There was an actual, honest-to-God wardrobe in the corner, delightfully tall and mysterious, and the small bed he’d been sleeping in before was conspicuous by its absence, replaced by a larger one, in a shiny brass frame, that practically demanded to be jumped on. In anticipation of winter, it was piled high with blankets, including one that looked convincingly like real fur, even though he was pretty sure neither Hela nor Dad would stand for it being made out of an actual polar bear.

By that time he could hear Dad’s voice from downstairs, so jumping would have to wait. Loki only had time to let himself sit on the bed and kick his feet with glee a few times before he resumed exploring. There was no magic door to Narnia in the back of the wardrobe behind his clothes, but he wasn’t giving up, because there was always tomorrow; his personal not-shared-with-Thor toys, including the stuffed bilgesnipe that he pointedly didn’t hug while sleeping anymore but still very much wanted to _have,_ all seemed to be present and accounted for. He took his gold helmet out of its box and put it in a prominent place on the dresser; he still wasn’t clear on why some lady named Freya had sent it to him as a present, but Dad talked about her like she was someone important and slightly terrifying, which gave the helmet even more cachet than it had by just being awesome. He checked the wooden floor carefully for loose boards, which books had told him were the traditional hiding place for all kinds of secret things, and when he didn’t find any, he made a mental note to create some. And then, while he was getting up from the floor, he glanced up at the ceiling and saw something amazing.

It might not have looked like much to anyone else. A rectangle of ceiling, maybe three feet by four feet wide, that was wood instead of plaster, set into a frame, with a rope hanging down that was just low enough for someone on a ladder—or, say, a very tall piece of furniture—to grab and pull down. _Just the attic access,_ someone who was ancient and boring might have said. But to Loki, whose room had so far lacked nothing but a secret passageway to be _perfect,_ it looked exactly like an adventure.

“Looookiiii!” Thor called, and a moment later there was a scrabbling sound in the hallway and the bedroom door burst open to admit him. Thor rushed into the room, beaming, looked around quickly, and finally let his eyes drift up to where Loki was already on top of the wardrobe, reaching for the rope. “What are you doing?” he demanded, alarmed. “You’re gonna fall off there and get killed!”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” said Loki. It was adults’ favorite thing to say to him, so it stood to reason that it should be effective. Would’ve made for a good prank to deliberately fall off at that point, but Dad had made him promise not to pretend to be dead in front of Thor anymore on pain of never having ice cream again, so he reluctantly tabled the idea. “Nnngh, I can’t get it. Can you fly up there and grab the rope?”

“What’s it gonna do if I pull on it?” Thor asked warily. “Also Dad says I have to keep my hammer in my room. Also also, Dad said to find you because he wants to tell you the rules.”

“Then why would it be in my interests to be found?” Loki asked, reasonably. “This is how you get in the attic. Which is probably _over_ your room, so if there happened to be a hole in your ceiling, then technically—”

“There’s probably lots of spiders up there,” Thor said, an idea that appeared to be swaying him in the attic’s favor more than anything Loki had said so far. 

“See? Help me get in.”

Hela poked her head into the doorway. “What are you two little dinguses doing in here?” she asked, having ascertained long ago that Bucky couldn’t take that one seriously as a Swear Jar word.

“Trying to get in the attic. Help me,” Loki said, in the tone that could quickly become a whine if he didn’t get his way.

Hela looked up, ascertained the problem, and sighed. “I don’t like using my magic for stuff like this,” she said, more out of form than anything else. She was obviously gonna do it anyway; pushing fifteen she might be, but she wasn’t too old for the allure of a hidden space to negate considerations of common sense and/or spiders. Closing her eyes and extending her arms, she let herself drift gently upward until she could reach the rope and give it a good hard yank.

The panel swung open on squealing hinges, bringing with it a shower of dust and plaster that made her yelp—the stuff was probably in her _hair_ now, _gross—_ but what happened next was undeniably cool: a short metal ladder swung down along with it. It wasn’t unlike a fire escape ladder, something she’d seen plenty of times on visits to her Earth aunts’ and uncles’ apartments, and after a moment of inspecting it and then fiddling with rusted latches, she figured out how to make it slide down and extend itself until it hung just a few feet off the floor. By rights, having been the one who opened the door, she should have been the first one through it, but Loki was already demanding that Thor boost him up, so she let them both scramble up the steps and took some consolation in floating up through the ceiling in a more dignified manner before letting her feet drop to the wooden floor.

The attic was _wonderful._ It was all old junk, stuff that had obviously been moldering up here for decades, way longer than any of them had been alive. There were old chests and stacks of mildewed shoeboxes, furniture covered in dust sheets and the rusted springs from an old mattress, broken bits and pieces of mysterious junk that would take weeks to fully explore. Loki made a beeline for a decrepit rocking horse painted with a rueful expression, wiped dust off its back, sneezed, and climbed onto it anyway, giving it a few creaking rocks. “Look, Thor! I’m riding into battle! Rarrr!”

Thor, boringly, had looked around the attic and made a beeline for its least interesting feature: a small gabled window with a window seat underneath. The glass was too dingy to see through; he knelt on the seat, hitched up the hem of his T-shirt and scrubbed a layer of grime off the lowest pane. “Wow,” he said. “Loki, come look. You can see everything from up here.”

“It’s just woods, Thor.”

“No it isn’t,” Thor told him. “There’s a house. Like a… mile that way, I think?” He was still getting the hang of Earth measurements. “There’s smoke coming up from a chimney.”

“What? Let me see.” Loki was at the window in a moment, shoving Thor to the side. “Dad said there was nobody around.”

“Well, Dad must’ve been wrong.”

“Maybe it’s a witch,” Loki said. “Maybe they just moved their cottage here. Maybe that’s why Dad didn’t know about them yet.”

“What, like in a fairy tale?” Hela said, with deep contempt. “It’s probably just some boring old person.”

“Old people can be witches,” Loki said. “We should go check it out.”

“Loki, no, Dad said—”

 _“La la la la I can’t hear you,”_ Loki said, sticking his fingers in his ears, and vanished.

“Crap,” Hela said. “Loki, come out right now, I’m not playing—hey!” The pull-down ladder was rattling; Loki was climbing down, and as soon as she realized it, she heard his feet hit the floor and running steps take off, out of the bedroom and down the hallway. “You wanna get us all in trouble?” she shouted, lunging after him and following him as far as the living room, only to look around and see him… or an image of him; it was impossible to tell when he wasn’t in grabbing distance… outside, heading purposefully across the front yard toward the treeline. 

Well, there was no question whether Loki was the sneakiest of the Barnes kids, but Hela had a secret weapon. She opened the door and whistled, and Fenris bolted through the house, racing after Loki and leaping at him in one smooth movement. Fenris didn’t bite without a direct command, but he definitely knew how to tackle, and he, unlike Hela, couldn’t be tricked by illusions, because he didn’t hunt with only his eyes. Fenris kept Loki pinned under one enormous front paw until she caught up to both of them and grabbed him under the shoulders, ready to haul him back indoors. “No way,” she told her wriggling little brother. “Dad said no going further than the mailbox without telling him.”

“I’m _not_ going past the mailbox,” Loki protested. “The mailbox is over there and I’m going over…” He locked eyes with Thor, who was trotting up behind Hela, and grinned. “Hey, Thor,” he said, and cut his eyes downward, toward Hela’s hip. “What do we say to the god of death?”

An answering grin spread across Thor’s face as he followed Loki’s eyes to the cell phone sticking out of Hela’s back pocket. “I got your phone,” he said, swiping it and making a break for the trees.

“Ooh, you little _monster,”_ Hela shrieked, letting go of Loki and pelting after him. “I’m telling Dad on both of you!”

“Gotta catch us first!” Loki shouted, and took off after Thor.

There’d be consequences for this, either from Dad or from Hela—totally worth it if they were from Dad, only debatably worth it if Hela was the one dealing out justice. But whatever happened was a problem for future Loki. Present Loki was off on an adventure, and it was going to be extraordinary.

“Huh,” Steve said, pausing what he was doing and sitting up when he heard feet pounding on the stairs. Ignoring Bucky’s immediate sounds of protest, he said, “Didn’t think they’d completely forget everything you said to them _that_ fast. Want me to go stop them?”

“Jesus, Rogers, you just got my clothes off, of course I don’t want you to go stop them.” Bucky paused, listening. “Okay, going out the front door is an interesting choice. Less subtle than I expected of Loki, frankly. I was betting on the tree outside Hela’s bedroom window. That thing’s practically made for sneaking out right under our noses.”

“You knew that and you put her in that room anyway?”

“Of course I did,” Bucky said. “Same as I put Thor in a room with a gable window where he can get out on the roof. I wanted them to have the authentic Earth kid experience.”

“Says the guy whose Earth kid experience is a century out of date and who used to get yelled at by his mother not to run out in front of _horses.”_

“Come on, Steve, give me a little credit. I’ve been dealing with these kids for nine years now. There was never any way I was gonna keep two Asgardians and a miniature frost giant out of trouble, so I have to steer them into the right kind of trouble. Which I think you’ll find is still a hell of a lot less than you got me into at any of their respective ages.”

“Yeah? What about the bears and coyotes and moose?”

“Oh, that stuff’s out there, but they’re not gonna come across any of it. First off, it’d take a pretty ballsy Earth animal to pick a fight with Fenris, and second, I have Mae’s scanners turned up to the point where a squirrel doesn’t fart in these woods without her knowing about it.” Bucky pressed one of the kimoyo beads on his bracelet, the only thing he’d been wearing that hadn’t landed on the floor yet, and said, “Mae, keep an eye on the kids and let me know if they look like they’re getting in any worse trouble than hungry or lost, okay?”

“You got it, boss,” said the voice of Bucky’s spaceship, making Steve jump, as usual. All those years around JARVIS, and then FRIDAY, should have gotten him used to AIs, but no, Bucky had to go and program his with that unmistakable husky Mae West drawl. _What?_ he’d said, when Steve complained about it. _You of all people oughta be glad I got a thing about troublemaking blondes from Brooklyn._

“Thanks, Mae. Okay?” Bucky asked, pointedly guiding Steve’s hand back to where it had been, and Steve sighed.

“We should stop, you know,” he said. “Like you said, by the time the kids get back here, they’re gonna be hungry and exhausted, and we’re gonna have to feed them.”

“Nah,” Bucky said. “If my plan goes off the way it’s supposed to, dinner’s gonna be taken care of for us.”

“What, Fenris is gonna bring down an elk and we’re gonna have homemade Asgardian roasted-haunch-of-ruminant for dinner? I don’t think Hela’s quite that flexible of a vegetarian.”

“I told you, Steve, I _got_ this. Have a little faith, would you? We’re gonna give them an hour, let them get good and lost, and then we’re gonna go after them and you can give them your disappointed Captain America look and a stern talking-to. Now, seeing as this is the last time we’re gonna have the house to ourselves for a while because I’m gonna have to ground the kids for doing exactly what I expected of them, the question is whether we’re gonna make any progress today, or whether you’re gonna waste the whole hour annoying me with stupid questions.”

“Well,” Steve said, “faced with a decision like that, I guess I’m in favor of progress.”

“Good. So get back down here and get on with it,” Bucky said, and this time, when Bucky reached up, Steve let himself be dragged back down to the bed.

They only made it twenty-seven minutes in before the bed frame broke, a problem that Bucky blamed, with numerous Swear Jar words, on the movers, but Steve couldn’t be too upset about it. He’d been thinking about upgrading it to something king-sized anyway.

The Odinbrood were a trio of smart kids, and highly educated smart kids to boot, but there’d never been a reason for them to learn Earth navigation on any of their previous visits to the planet, and it hadn’t occurred to Hela until it was too late that there was a reason her phone should have either Earth maps or a compass app on it. Finding her way home if she’d been dropped on Xandar, or in a ship in the middle of an asteroid field, sure; but finding your way through the woods, it turned out, was only easy until you tried it. She was _pretty_ sure she’d been headed toward home after she finally caught up to her brothers and enforced her decision, by way of her clenched fists and Fenris’s bared teeth, that they were going back to the house _right now or else,_ but they’d been walking a lot longer than they should have needed to get back to the house, and there was no sign of it, or the road, or anything familiar. When they hit the creek, which they definitely hadn’t crossed on their way out, Loki said, “I think you should call Dad, Hela.”

“You’re just scared because Dad said there were coyotes,” said Thor, making this sound completely unreasonable.

“I’m not scared of coyotes,” Loki said haughtily. “Fenris could eat a coyote. I’m scared of the mooses, and you’d be too if you were smart, because I don’t think you know how big they are in real life.”

“Moose,” Hela corrected. “Not mooses.”

“That doesn’t sound right either,” said Thor. “If more than one goose is geese, then shouldn’t mooses be meese?”

“No,” Hela told him. “It’s an irregular plural. It’s the same thing with sheep, and fish, and buffalo.”

Thor and Loki were both silent for a moment, absorbing this. All three of them were used to their magic correcting for linguistic variance, which was how they went from speaking English to Wakandan to Xandarian to Groot seamlessly, but apparently moose were so weird that even Allspeak couldn’t figure them out. “English is stupid,” Thor finally said, decisively.

“No arguments from me,” said Hela. “We _are_ lost, though.” It was safe to admit it, now that Loki had been designated the scared one. She unlocked her phone—retrieved from Thor by the simple expedient of twisting his arm behind his back until he yelled that he gave up; it wasn’t nice, but it worked—and frowned. “There’s no signal.”

“You should get up higher, then,” Thor suggested.

“No, Thor, I mean there’s no signal from the _Mae,_ either.” Calling Hela’s device a phone was a little bit of a misnomer; it was a Xandarian communicator, which her father embarrassingly called a space phone, but it was close enough. The thing was, it didn’t just pick up wi-fi; there was _always_ a signal from the locator beacon on the _Mae West,_ so she could find her way back to it. Which didn’t do her a lot of good in _this_ situation, because the _Mae_ was parked on the back side of Earth’s single lonely moon, but the fact that the little icon at the top of the screen was missing was weird. “The only reason that would be is if something’s jamming the signal.”

“Oh, shit, the moose have developed technology,” said Loki. “I knew it was a mistake to come to this planet.”

“You have the weirdest brain of anyone I’ve ever met,” Hela told him, not without a hint of admiration, “and it’s not moose. It’s probably those neighbors you jerks wanted to meet. They’re probably like weird survivalists or something and they have a jammer because they’re afraid of getting spied on by the government. Dad’s not gonna like it if it affects stuff close to our place.”

“Oh, so if we want to do anything Dad doesn’t have to know about, then we can just—”

 _“No._ We’re going home, as soon as we figure out which way it is.” She thought about it. “Maybe Fenris can smell his way back. Fenris! Fenris, go home,” she ordered, in her sternest voice. “Go find Dad right now.”

Fenris tipped his head to the side, whined, and lay down, turning his belly up and looking at Hela hopefully.

“That,” Loki said, “is an effort I would classify as less than helpful.”

“You could see where the house is if you fly up over the trees,” Thor offered. As differently as their respective magics worked, he still wasn’t convinced that he wouldn’t pick up the trick of flying without the hammer if he saw Hela do it often enough.

“Yeah, and what if we’re, like, right by the neighbors and they see a teenager flying around and report it to somebody? That’s a _for sure_ way for all of us to get grounded for the rest of our lives.”

“It’s better than asking the dog,” Thor said, kicking a patch of dirt. “Loki, you always have an idea. What should we do?”

 _“I_ don’t know! Why is it always my problem to figure it out?”

“Okay, we’ll just all get eaten by moose together.”

“Aaaaa!”

“Oh my God, shut _up,_ you two,” Hela said sharply. “Do you hear that?” Fenris had perked up his ears, too, listening, and in a minute they all heard it: the sound of a motor, or an engine, somewhere overhead and swooping closer.

They’d all had a little individual training, as much as Dad would let them have in magic and in self-defense, but later in his life, Thor would think fondly of this day as the first time the Odinbrood found out that when they needed to, they could think and act as a unit. Loki cast one of his illusions, scattering identical copies of all three of them across a hundred feet of forest; Hela plucked a long spike out of thin air and slid one foot back, dropping into the spear-throwing stance she’d learned over the course of a long afternoon with Aunt Okoye; Thor didn’t have a weapon, and there wasn’t time to call Mjolnir, but he reached overhead with his own magic and… well, okay, pulling in a couple of clouds didn’t look like much, but whatever was coming _was_ in the sky, so it might help. Besides, he was sure he was gonna be able to pull down some lightning one of these times; he could feel it. So they were all standing there together, ready to face down whoever or whatever was coming for them, when a sleek blue humanoid shape appeared over the treetops and swooped down into the clearing… and they all saw, at the same moment, the face plate pop up, and the helmet retract into the body of the mechanized suit.

“Hey, kids,” said their Aunt Pepper, smiling. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Come up to the house. We’ve got cookies.”

“I don’t like to say I told you so—” Bucky began, as he pulled the minivan into the Starks’ driveway.

“If you’re gonna lie, Buck, at least try to make it plausible.”

“—But there really was only one place they were gonna fetch up. If they’d gone south or west, they would’ve hit the fence line or the road, and north is all uphill. Everybody goes downhill in the woods, it’s just easier—”

“You know I was _there_ for the time we let Morita navigate and wound up practically falling in the Moselle, right?” 

“—So naturally they were gonna wind up on one of Tony and Pep’s security cameras, and here we are,” Bucky said smugly. “No harm, no foul.”

 _“Dad!”_ Hela shouted, storming down the driveway to meet them. _“You set us up!”_

“Excuse me, young lady?” Bucky said, raising an eyebrow. “Because I seem to remember specifically forbidding all three of you to—”

“You know telling Loki not to do something is the fastest way to make him do it! And I had to go after him because I’d feel bad if he got lost, and then we _all_ got lost! What if we’d all got eaten by moose? Then I bet you’d be sorry!” 

“You know, I thought it was just one of your kids who had a flair for the dramatic,” Steve murmured.

“Tell me about it.” Raising his voice back to normal levels, Bucky said, “The important thing is that everybody’s okay, and nobody got eaten by anything.”

“The important thing is that you didn’t tell us we live next door to Aunt Pepper and Uncle Tony,” Thor said, following Hela out to the yard, holding tightly to Pepper’s hand. Loki trailed behind them, obviously doing his best to be unnoticeable without actually becoming invisible. “It’s a good surprise, though.”

“It’s a wonderful surprise,” Pepper agreed, coming forward and putting her free arm around Bucky’s shoulders in a quick hug. “Ever since we moved out here, Tony’s been saying he wanted to buy the old farm whenever Mrs. Leigh finally decided to sell it off, so that no horrible developers would get their hands on it and build McMansions right up to our property line. We didn’t even know it was for sale; I still don’t know how you beat us to it.”

“Yeah, how did you beat them to it, Bucky?” Steve asked, and Bucky’s eyes shifted guiltily, confirming his worst suspicions. “Buck, did you seriously—for God’s sake, you _know_ you could tear a hole in the space-time continuum that way.”

“Look around, Steve. Reality’s _fine._ Stop being such a worrywart. Pepper, is Tony around? Might as well say hi before I drag my troublemakers home to be grounded till they’re thirty.”

“Tony and Morgan are out, but they’ll be back any minute,” Pepper said, obviously trying not to laugh in front of said troublemakers. “Tell you what, why don’t you stay and we’ll all have dinner?”

“Aw, no, Pep, that’s really sweet, but we couldn’t,” Bucky said. “You have no idea how many calories it takes to support a family with two super-soldiers and three Asgardians in it.”

“Nonsense. Morgan’s slumber parties are already keeping the local pizzeria in business. They even have a mushroom-and-garlic option that’s vegan and gluten-free. Don’t say no to me, Bucky. Although I do expect you to come inside and help me get the extra chairs down.”

“Well, if you’re gonna make the CEO-of-Stark Industries face at me,” Bucky said, with enough feigned reluctance to make Steve snort. _You_ _planned_ _this,_ he mouthed, as Pepper turned toward the house, and Bucky gave him a little two-fingered salute before he followed her, all but whistling innocently. Well, let him pretend to flirt and give Pepper the _yes ma’am, no ma’am_ treatment for a while; Bucky would make it up to him later, and it did drive Tony crazy, which was always entertaining to watch. 

And speak of the devil: here came Tony himself, zipping up the driveway in the latest of his garishly bright sports cars. It was actually kind of reassuring, Steve thought, that in spite of all the things that had happened to this universe’s Tony, he hadn’t changed _that_ much. The Tony in the parallel universe Steve had been pulled here from, the one who’d seen Bucky die in the war instead of Steve, had. His world’s Sam had told him bluntly that everybody had always kind of expected Steve to go out in a big heroic gesture; “It was probably worse for him not to get a chance to make things right with Barnes,” he’d said, and Steve was inclined to agree. His world’s Tony had survived, although things had looked iffy for him during that second stint in rehab, but his marriage to Pepper hadn’t, and it had taken a long time for the shadows to clear out from behind his eyes. Before Hela pulled off her miracle and brought him and Bucky back together in this universe, Steve had caught himself bitterly thinking that it might have been kinder if Tony had died instead of Bucky, and irrationally hated himself for that even while he kept on thinking it.

But this world’s Tony was even more remarkable to Steve because he knew how narrowly that slide into despair had been avoided. Sure, the Tony standing in front of him today had gotten older—that stupid goatee of his was on the salt side of salt-and-pepper now, and he’d finally conceded to start carrying a cane, although he still treated it less like an assistive device for his bad leg than as a stylish accessory to poke people with—but he was still actively supporting version 2.0 of the Avengers, still coming up with new ideas, still enjoying his fast cars and rock & roll. And maybe most importantly, both versions of Morgan had always loved their dad, but this world’s Morgan had never stopped admiring him. “Okay, but seriously, Dad, you gotta admit that if I can fly the suit, it’s stupid that I can’t drive a car that only goes on a horizontal axis,” she was saying, as she opened the car door. 

“Oh, hey, check it out,” Tony said, catching sight of the Barnes-Rogers clan at the same moment she did. “Team USA Winter Sports and the tiny Scandinavian metal band came to visit. Barnes, I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow. You two muscle men decide you couldn’t move in without my help, or what?”

“We’ll tell you all about it over dinner, Tony.” Pepper had turned back and waited when she heard the car, and now she was leaning in for the obligatory “we’ve been married for sixteen years, but I still missed you” peck on the cheek. Steve wondered if he and Bucky would still be like that a decade from now. Then he realized he hadn’t even noticed when Bucky drifted back to him and rested his metal hand on the small of his back, and he stopped wondering. “For now,” Pepper went on, “you kids come inside and get washed up, and then we’re going to talk pizza orders.”

“Pizzaaa,” Thor echoed, softly and gleefully, following Pepper inside. Sure, grounding would probably suck later, but pizza was _now._

“So how’s the house?” Tony sing-songed at Bucky, and then paused, following Bucky’s eyes. Morgan was frozen in the act of getting out of the car, with one foot on the ground and the other still on the running board. When the car started making its angry open-door ding at her, she shook herself and stood up, slamming the door without moving her eyes away from Hela, who was staring back, looking equally shell-shocked.

“Hey, Morgan,” she said, and Steve didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he realized he knew exactly what that look on a fourteen-year-old kid’s face was all about.

“Hey, Hela.” Morgan licked her lips. “I haven’t seen you in, like, forever.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, go hug your friend already,” Bucky said, grinning and nudging her forward, and Hela did, moving carefully, like she was afraid one or both of them was likely to break. “Wow,” he said, once he judged she was out of earshot, “I forgot how long it’d been since the two of them saw each other. It’s been, what, a year? Eighteen months? Last time we visited, I think she was at space camp, ironically.”

“Summer of ’36?” Steve asked.

“Summer of thirty-fucking-six, all right. For me, I mean, obviously. Hit me the minute I laid eyes on you, before I even got off the train coming back from Indiana. _You_ didn’t figure it out until, what, Wakanda in 2016?”

“Well, I always was a little slower than you on the uptake.”

“What…” Tony said, looking frantically between them. “What are you two picking up here that I’m not, exactly?”

“ ‘Two households, both alike in dignity,’ ” Steve said quietly, “ ‘in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge’—” 

“Oh, no. No no no no no no no no no,” Tony said, backing away in horror. “No. No. Morgan? Honey? Go in the house until Dad can construct some kind of tower to put you in until you’re ninety, okay?”

“Excuse you, Tony,” Bucky said sharply. “Are you about to tell me that my daughter, who’s a literal goddess, isn’t good enough for your kid?”

“Shut up, Barnes, you know that’s not… I mean, okay, some people _might_ take issue with their beloved only child exhibiting signs of a schoolgirl crush on the goddess of death—”

“I don’t think that’s exactly what she is anymore—” 

“—Noted, but Morgan’s not into girls,” Tony said.

Steve put a hand on Bucky’s shoulder; Bucky’s face hadn’t changed, but there’d been a brief flash of the Winter Soldier in his eyes. “Stark,” he said, “this had better not be some kind of homophobia thing.”

“Wh—shit, no! Morgan’s never been into _anyone,_ is what I meant. I know you’re gonna say this is the overprotective dad in me talking, but take it from a guy who _was_ into girls when I was fifteen, Barnes—Morgan isn’t. Ask Pep if you don’t believe me. We made her go to a school dance last year to have, you know, the mortifying experience of being a normal American teen, and she called it ‘a complete waste of time I could’ve used to work on the cosmological constant problem and also gross.’ I thought she was gonna be on the ace spectrum and believe me, given what I got up to at her age, that was gonna be a huge relief.”

“Maybe that’s the point, Tony,” Steve said, as gently as he could. “Morgan’s not a normal teenager, and even at that fancy school of hers, there aren’t going to be too many other kids on her level. But, hey,” he added, seriously, “take comfort in the fact that if Hela’s anything like her old man, then whatever happens, whether or not the two of them ever decide to date and/or wind up together at some point far in the future, she’s still gonna be the best, most loyal friend your kid could ever hope for.”

“Not to mention that she’s probably gonna wait until she’s really sure she’s not overstepping to say anything about it,” Bucky added ruefully. “Because she definitely won’t want to make a wrong move and ruin their friendship. You want someone who’s gonna respect your daughter? Shit, I took respect to a level that was practically pathological.”

“There’s gonna be so much pining,” Steve said cheerfully.

“Yes, the pining. God, the pining. Hopefully Hela gets to skip the part with the brainwashing and the evil, though.”

“Well, yeah, let’s _hope,”_ Tony grumbled. “Still, if you’ve ever loved me, Rogers, you’ll go over there and give them both a dose of the Disapproving Cap face. Nobody can have, you know, amorous thoughts with that look going on.”

“Bold of you to assume I don’t enjoy it,” Bucky said blandly.

“Aaaaa! I do _not_ want to know about the sex lives of my local centenarians, please and thank you. Can we just go inside and eat pizza and forget I ever said anything about any of this?”

“Sure,” Steve said, his face the picture of innocence. “Oh, by the way, I meant to ask. Do you know of any good furniture stores nearby? Because while the kids were out of the house this afternoon, Bucky and I kind of broke our bed.”

“Aaaaaaaaaa!”

Exhausted by their accidental nature walk, Thor and Loki had both fallen asleep in the minivan on the short drive home, and Steve had carried them up to their beds still in their pizza comas before heading to bed himself. Bucky stayed downstairs a little longer, locking up the farmhouse and then spending a few minutes sitting in the living room with the Sacred Reznor curled up near his feet, trying to get a feel for the unfamiliar noises of the new house. There were owls outside, and something that could have been a dog or a coyote off in the distance; he smiled to himself when it crossed his mind that it had probably just picked up Fenris’s scent and was getting its eyes opened to a whole new world of canine smells. This was a good place, this old farm. It wouldn’t be perfect until he got some goats, obviously, but coming here had been the right move. It was a better place for kids than the spaceship. And the _Mae_ wasn’t gone, of course. He’d brought the kids down on the shuttle, just to have it close to hand in case of emergencies (it was parked behind the barn, under one of those nifty little Wakandan invisibility shields), but they could teleport back at a moment’s notice. He’d promised them a year here, as a trial run, so they could always go back to space if they ended up not liking it, although he found it unlikely that they would; a year would give them a good taste of what life on a planet was like, let them start to understand that people had to take care of these places because most of the sentient beings in the universe didn’t have the option to just up and leave them. He was just feeling nostalgic about the place where he and the kids had spent almost nine years, that was all, and it would be a relief when he got settled in here and started thinking of this place as home.

He finally got up and followed Steve up the stairs, noticing where they creaked so he could avoid those spots when he inevitably woke up in the night and wanted to go down to the kitchen. He was pretty good at moving quietly, but he wasn’t trying to be silent, so it wasn’t a surprise when Hela called softly, “Dad?”

She’d left her bedroom door cracked open, something she’d done once in a while when she was younger. It usually meant she had something on her mind and wanted him to peek in so she’d have an excuse to talk to him, so he did. “Yeah, baby girl? Everything okay?”

Hela was curled up in bed with her makeup off, her hair down, and wearing fuzzy green pajamas with little coffee cups on them, the stuffed dog that she pretended she didn’t still sleep with hugged tight to her chest. She didn’t usually let anyone, not even him, see her looking so adorable, or so vulnerable. “Dad,” she said, “do you think I’d be a safe person to go on a date with?”

Bucky took a breath, steadying himself. _So help me, Stark, if this is because she heard you running your mouth…_ “Okay, first off,” he said, stepping inside and sitting down on the edge of her bed, “yes, Hela, I do think you’d be a safe person to go on a date with. Not only a safe person, but a kind person, too. But I want to talk about why you’re asking that question. Did someone say something that made you worry?”

“No,” Hela said, and he thought she was being sincere about that. “I just… you know, Dad, the whole death magic thing. I just never really thought about what it would mean, you know? What if… what if people didn’t like me because of it, or they were scared of me?”

“Baby girl, your power is completely under control as far as I can tell, so anybody who’s scared of you is either really stupid, or they’re evil and they know they’re on your list of people who need their asses kicked.” Hela giggled in spite of herself at that. “Now, I’m not going to guarantee that anybody you ask will go out with you, but it’s not always personal when people say no. We’ve talked a million times about how you always have the right to say no, too, and you don’t have to make an excuse for it. Right?”

“Yeah, I just…” Hela sighed, and Bucky carefully kept himself from smiling at what a quintessentially lovestruck teenage sound it was. “I was just thinking about, like… Would I be allowed to ask somebody out? I’m not gonna, I just want to know.”

“Yeah, I think so,” Bucky said, aware that he was letting out a pretty fucking wistful sigh of his own. “It’s really bittersweet for parents when their kids start thinking about this stuff, just so you know. But you’re pushing fifteen with both hands, and I can’t keep you a kid forever, no matter how much I might want to. I do want you to go someplace that’s in public and keep your phone on, but I could probably see fit to drop you off at a movie theater or something. Are movie theaters still a thing?”

_“Dad.”_

“Kidding. Yes, Hela, as long as you’re honest with me and I get to approve where you’re going, you could hypothetically go out on a date if you wanted to. And you know you can ask me anything you want any time and you won’t get in trouble about it, right? Or if you don’t want to ask me, you can ask Steve, or Aunt Pepper, or Aunt Natasha. It’s hard enough being a teenager without being able to talk to someone who’s been through the same stuff. Even if, in my and Steve’s case, it was a ridiculously long time ago.”

“So, hypothetically,” Hela said slowly, “if you ask somebody out, what do you say?”

“I think it’s best to keep it simple,” Bucky said. “Otherwise you’re both gonna spend an annoying amount of time wondering if the other person thinks it’s a date. I always liked to say something like, ‘Hey, would you be interested in going out on a date sometime?,’ so there was no confusion. And if they say no, say something like ‘Okay, no big deal,’ even if you both know you’re lying, and then go be upset somewhere in private. But if they say yes, then say you’ll text them about it later and leave before you say something uncool and ruin it. Basically, like a lot of things in life, it’s important to have an exit strategy.”

“Is that how you asked Steve, when you finally asked him?”

“Oh, God, kiddo, the way me and Steve got together should _not_ be your template. Is there anything else on your mind?”

“No. Thanks, Dad.”

“No problem. Get some sleep, and we can talk more about this any time, okay? Goodnight.” 

Bucky eased the door shut and made his way down the hall to his own bedroom. He didn’t let out the breath he was holding until he’d shut the door. “You okay?” Steve asked, as he flopped down on the bed—well, the mattress on the floor, because at the end of the day, the bed frame had been unsalvageable. 

“Nope,” Bucky said. “My kid wants to go on dates. I’m completely freaked out and I’ve got that ‘Sunrise, Sunset’ song playing on a loop in my brain. I didn’t freak out in front of her, though, so, you know, successful parenting. Suck it, Odin.”

Steve put his arms around Bucky and buried his face against his shoulder, laughing softly. “I love you, Barnes.”

“You better, Rogers.” Bucky paused. There was a soft tapping at the doorframe. “Yeah?” he called, and the door swung open and Loki peered cautiously inside. 

“Dad, Steve,” he said, “can I sleep in here tonight?”

“Don’t you like your new room?” Bucky asked, surprised.

Loki shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. “I had a bad dream about moose.”

Bucky shot a questioning glance at Steve, who returned it with an _I knew what I was getting into when I married you_ shrug. “Okay, c’mon in,” he said, and Loki scrambled up in between them—Bucky had never been so glad they’d agreed on their _pyjamas on if the door is unlocked_ rule—and slid under the covers. “Goodnight, kiddo,” he said, and switched off the lamp.

“Dad?” Loki said sleepily. “What happened to your bed?”

“Go to sleep, Lokes,” Bucky said firmly. “We can talk about it in the morning.”


	2. Ikea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, you were expecting plot? Too bad. This is a curtain fic now.

“Hi,” Loki said to the greeter at the store entrance. “Could you tell us where you keep the beds, please? Because my dads broke their bed doing sex stuff and I have more important things to do today than furniture shopping, so we need to wrap this up as fast as we can.”

_ “Loki.”  _ Bucky retrieved his child, shot an apologetic look at the greeter—Inga, according to her nametag—and turned him around, squatting down so he could look Loki in the eyes. It took him a moment to find the right words, and even though Steve was sure his face was just as red as Bucky’s, he was struggling not to laugh, especially not when Hela let out just about the most put-upon teenaged sigh he’d ever heard in his life. Thor, meanwhile, was contemplatively gauging the height of the ceilings, even though Bucky had pointedly gone back into the house and checked that Mjolnir was still sitting in the corner of Thor’s bedroom like it was supposed to be. Yep, Bucky had been telling the truth when he said this was going to be an adventure.

What Bucky finally said was, “Kiddo, I’m asking you this sincerely, because I really want to know: where did I go so wrong as a parent that you feel a need to say things like that to strangers at Ikea?”

“You didn’t,” Loki said, meeting his gaze with equal sincerity. “I do it for attention, Dad. I thought you knew that.”

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long exhale. “Inga,” he said, “I sincerely apologize for my son, whose judgment hasn’t caught up to his smarts yet. That said, could you please direct us to the café? Because I already have ornery children and I’m definitely not going shopping with hangry ones.”

Inga was holding back her laughter just as poorly as Steve was. “Top of the escalator and turn left,” she said. “You can’t miss it. Is this your first visit to the store?”

“Yes,” Loki spoke up, before Bucky could answer. “Dad says we have to come here because it’s part of our cultural heritage.”

“I said Scandinavia was part of your heritage, not Ikea specif—” Bucky sighed again. “Loki, stop trolling. Kids, stick together, we’re going to fuel up. Inga, I sincerely hope we’re the worst thing that happens to you today, and I thank you for your patience.”

“It’s fine, sir. We get a lot of families with young kids in the store. I completely understand.” 

The way Inga’s eyes dipped down and followed Bucky’s pleasantly snug jeans as he steered Loki onto the escalator made Steve think they weren’t leaving an entirely bad experience behind them, as it were. “Let’s go, Hela,” he said, and when she looked up from her phone, he motioned for her and Thor to follow Bucky toward the promise of coffee. “And what exactly do you have to do today that’s so important, anyway?” he asked Loki, while the escalator lifted them toward the second floor.

“I was  _ going  _ to start fortifying the house with anti-moose defenses,” Loki said darkly.

“If mooses attacked our house, I’d get my hammer and smash them all for you,” Thor said, sounding somewhat hurt that Loki hadn’t thought of this.

“But what if you were asleep?” said Loki. “Or if there were a  _ lot  _ of them?”

“If it helps,” Steve told him solemnly, “I think it’s unlikely that a moose could get its antlers through the house’s front door.”

Loki gave a thoughtful nod. “It does help. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that we finally have someone sensible around here,” he said, and Steve would have taken issue with the fact that  _ that  _ was what made Bucky snort with laughter if Bucky hadn’t headed toward the café at high speed the instant he hit the top of the escalator.

When he saw the restaurant, Steve stopped so sharply that Hela, who was head down over her phone again, actually walked into him and gave an offended yelp. Steve barely noticed. “Buck,” he said, delighted, “it’s an automat.” 

Bucky blinked. “Yeah,” he agreed, looking at the rows of plastic cases, “I guess it kind of is, isn’t it? Not exactly Horn & Hardart, but then, you don’t need exact change in nickels to get a sandwich, either. You kids can each get some fruit if you want, and  _ one  _ dessert—” Thor immediately tugged on the hem of Steve’s shirt, pointing to a slice of cake in one of the higher shelves, and Steve obligingly slid open the door and got it down for him—“but nobody load up on the other stuff, because we’re going to the hot food line for the main course. Since you all haven’t been here yet, we’re having the full Ikea experience.”

“Sure is cool that we get to go to an Earth store and eat Earth food,” Hela said pointedly, setting her phone on the edge of her tray so she could spend the minimum amount of time looking away from it while she navigated the line. 

“Hela, usually nobody appreciates you being a smartass more than me, but knock it off until I get my Earth coffee. The special, four regular and one vegan,” he told the lunch counter attendant, and as food was scooped and plates were distributed, he said, “Steve, can you make sure this all gets to a table without getting spilled? I need both hands for this.”

“Sure, but what…” Steve let his voice trail off as Bucky started piling small white mugs onto his tray. “I take it they don’t do refills.”

“Nope, I found out last time I was here that they want you to pay by the cup,” Bucky said, “so that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Steve took a deep breath, let it out, and went back to figuring out how to carry four plates and three juice glasses (Hela could carry her own; Thor offered to carry his and was emphatically denied) without spilling anything. He rejoined Bucky at the checkout line, where Bucky thumped down a tray that now held fifteen identical, brimming coffee cups.

The cashier at the till looked at Bucky, looked at the tray, opened her mouth, and shut it again. “Sir,” she began.

Bucky looked her straight in the eye. “I have three children,” he said. “Please ring up their food and my coffee.”

She rang up the coffee, and Bucky held her stare as he handed her his credit card and she handed it back with a receipt. “Sir?” she said, as Bucky hefted the tray of steaming cups again.

“Yeah?”

“Good luck with your shopping today.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said. “Pretty sure I’m gonna need it.”

“What,” Loki said, when the plate was set down in front of him, “are  _ those.”  _

“They’re called Swedish meatballs,” Steve told him, because it was never prudent to tear Bucky away from his caffeine. “Try them. They’re good.”

“They’re terrifying,” Loki said.

“I’ll eat yours if you don’t want them,” Thor said, with a mouth full of meatball, which had the predictable effect of making Loki pick up his knife and hold it over the plate defensively.

“Loki, no stabbing. Thor, no stealing food from your brother,” said Steve, who was starting to get the hang of Barnes family meals. “And Hela, could you put your phone down for five minutes and eat, please?”

Hela shoved her phone into her jeans pocket and speared a meatball on her fork, eyeing it suspiciously. “Are they really vegan?”

“The menu says they’ve got kale in them. I don’t think anyone’s volunteering to eat kale unless it’s part of a moral stance,” Steve assured her.

Hela bit into the pseudo-meatball and looked at it thoughtfully. “Huh. They’re not bad.”

“They’re excellent,” said Thor, already halfway through his serving. “I want more.”

“They’re disgusting,” said Loki, “but I’m eating them so we can get out of here faster and go back to addressing the moose threat.” Steve was pretty sure that was mostly for show, given that Loki did tuck into the meatballs after that; if he’d actually hated them, he probably would have feigned death and hoped Bucky would be too distracted by grounding him to notice that he hadn’t cleaned his plate first.

“I like whatever kind of spice is in it,” Hela said. “Is it cinnamon?”

As soon as she asked, everyone else’s eyes went instinctively to Bucky, the only one in the family who could actually cook. Bucky looked up from his second cup of coffee as if just remembering where he was, stole a meatball off Steve’s plate (“Hey,” said Steve), and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. Once he’d swallowed, he said, “Allspice is what that is, I’m pretty sure.”

“Is it from Asgard?” Thor asked.

“No, it’s grown on Earth,” Bucky said. “Why’d you think that?”

“Because our Allspeak thing is from Asgard.”

“You’re so stupid, Thor,” said Loki.

“I’m not stupid! You’re stupid!”

“Kids,” Steve said firmly, because Bucky was getting his  _ why did I think it was a good idea to steal these children  _ look for the third time that day and they hadn’t even started shopping yet. “Nobody at this table is stupid. It’s okay not to know things and to ask questions. Thor, you can have the rest of my meatballs, and I’ll go get myself another plate.”

“Steve, you don’t have to—”

“He’s a growing kid, Buck, it’s fine,” Steve said, and he actually didn’t mind. One day, when it wouldn’t come off as a  _ when I was your age we had a Depression  _ thing, he’d tell the kids about how Bucky used to work his charm on store clerks on the off chance of getting an extra apple or a couple pieces of penny candy slipped into the grocery sack, a surplus that usually made its way to Steve in short order. Then he’d tell them how he repaid those favors in the Army canteen, where the cooks were immune to even the most charming GIs’ pleading but would fall over themselves to dish out an extra helping for Captain America. Eventually the kids would understand that food was how the Barnes and Rogers families had shown love from the beginning—food that was sometimes stale, or boiled, or under-seasoned, but filled with love nonetheless. 

And if Steve happened to have seen the wisdom of Bucky’s plan and decided to pick up three or four coffees for himself on his way to the register, nobody needed to make a big deal about it.

“I think we should get a new couch, Steve,” Thor said, bouncing on the cushions of the one he was sitting on, and Steve resisted the urge to pick him up by the collar and carry him out of the Living Room display area, mother-cat style. Bucky had given him one job:  _ Get the kids to Bedrooms and start scouting things out, I’ll catch up,  _ he’d said, and by God, he was going to carry it out and not get the same lecture about staying on task that he’d been hearing since 1931.

“The couch we have at home is fine,” he said. “We don’t need anything in this area at all. Come on, Thor. Come on, Lo—Loki?  _ Loki,” _ and Loki did get bodily lifted out of a pile of cushions that Steve was sure hadn’t been in the middle of the floor two minutes ago. “What happened to not having a minute to spare?”

“We gotta wait for Dad to catch up anyway,” Loki said, making a dive for the pillow nest again.

“Your dad will just do his scary walk through here and everybody will scatter in front of him, and he’ll catch up to us in thirty seconds,” Steve said, catching Loki under the armpits and trying not to compare the literal children in front of him to Dugan and Dernier trying to sneak off in search of cigarettes or liquor every time the Howling Commandos found themselves in a civilian area. He’d relied on Bucky to ride herd on the Howlies more often than not, and this  _ probably  _ wasn’t some kind of extremely delayed payback. “Now could we please move along so we—oh, look at that.” One of the living room displays, each one tucked in its own little space, was set up like a studio apartment complete with studio, denoted by an easel, an adjustable lamp, and a clever little shelving unit that would be  _ perfect  _ for art supplies.

“Steeeve,” Loki grumbled.

“This is a quick look, not a disappearance and a full-scale manhunt for someone who turns out to be hiding on purpose. Also, this is a really well-designed easel,” Steve said. “Hela, would you do me a favor and write down this bin location so I can pick one up in the warehouse?”

“Write it  _ down?  _ Oh my God, why don’t I just carve it on a clay tablet in cuneiform?” Hela came up beside him, snapped a photo of the tag on the easel, and went back to whatever she’d been doing on her phone without ever looking up from the screen. 

Steve wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or impressed by the fact that Hela had found an age-based insult that Natasha hadn’t thought of yet. “Move out,” he said in his Cap voice, pointing toward the next showroom, and Thor and Loki didn’t quite run but did walk quickly to get ahead of him, while Hela gave another of her elaborate sighs and followed. 

Steve was about to follow when a pair of arms—one warm flesh, one cool metal—slid around his waist and pulled him in close. “Honest to God, Rogers, you didn’t even get them out of the first showroom yet?” Bucky said in his ear.

“I think my CO set me up for failure on this one, Sarge.” All this time in the future, and Steve still got a thrill out of being allowed to cuddle up to Bucky in public like this. “Where’d you go, anyway?”

“Bathroom, obviously. Goddamn super-metabolism, coffee goes right through.  _ You  _ know.”

“You really need to cut back on the caffeine. And seriously, what did you do when you didn’t have me to watch the kids when you needed a piss?”

“Suffered,” Bucky said fervently. “You looking at the easel? I’ll buy you one when we get to the warehouse, but only if you’re gonna behave yourself and not jump on the couches.”

“No promises,” said Steve.

“You know,” he told Bucky, when they were finally standing in the middle of the bedroom display space, “I feel very naive about the fact that as recently as forty-seven minutes ago, I didn’t think there were that many options for something as basic as a bedframe.”

“Well, we were younger then,” Bucky said. 

“By forty-seven minutes?”

“Hell, no. Ikea’s a liminal space, like a fairy circle. We’ve probably been in here for at least three decades by now.” Bucky reached out and gave the nearest frame a tentative push with his metal hand. “The Songesand isn’t bad,” he said, his tone implying that it wasn’t exactly good, either.

“I like the look of the Hasselvika,” Steve offered.

“That’s because it reminds you of the big heavy furniture everybody had when we were kids, which you, because you were skinny and sick, never had to move out of your friend’s apartment three months after you moved it  _ into  _ his apartment because he called his landlord a fascist pig.”

“Wow, okay. You haven’t been holding onto that one for a while or anything. Also, when people literally subscribe to the doctrines of fascism, they shouldn’t be surprised at being called fascists.”

“I think it was more the pig part that bothered him.” Bucky frowned. “What about the Hauga?”

“Too modern for me. The Tyssedal?”

“Not modern enough for me. The Kvalfjord?”

“Ugh. I’d take the Hemnes over the Kvalfjord.” 

“Remind me why I married you, again?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hela said, grabbing Bucky’s hand and dragging him to the far side of the room. “This is the one you want,” she said. “The Nordli.”

“Kiddo,” said Bucky, “I’m sorry, but the fact that neither of us likes the Nordli is the only thing Steve and I have agreed on in the last, uh, forty-nine minutes now.”

“It’s the one,” Hela insisted. “Look. It’s a box frame on the floor. It hasn’t got any legs to break under pressure. That’s what happened to the old bed, right? One of the legs gave out when you guys were, you know, banging?”

“You know,” Bucky said, while Steve tried his best not to implode from embarrassment, “when I said you kids could ask me any questions you had about sex, I didn’t exactly foresee us having this conversation.”

“Dad,” Hela said, aggrieved. “Look. There’s other stuff that’s good about this one too. It’s got storage drawers, for one thing. You could keep your million stupid blankets there and not even have to get out of bed to get them.”

“You do keep about four hundred more blankets on the bed than are strictly necessary,” said Steve.

“Because cryo! You of all people should understand that!”

“And,” said Hela, “the headboard has these little shelves on both sides for you,” she pointed to Steve, “to put your notebook and for you,” she pointed to Bucky, “to put your coffee cup.”

“...I think I love this bed,” said Bucky.

“It’s still ugly,” said Steve. “What?” he said, when Hela glared at him. “I’m sorry, I just can’t get into all this minimalist modern design. And everything being white just makes it hard to keep clean.”

“It comes in black,” said Hela.

“We’re buying it,” said Bucky. 

Steve sighed. “I’ll get used to it. But we’re  _ not  _ getting the matching dressers.”

“Of course not. We haven’t broken the dressers we already have.” Bucky shot him a sly grin. “Yet.”

“Oh my God,  _ Dad!”  _

“Relax, Hela. Your dad’s more likely to break something by slamming a drawer with that metal hand.” Which Steve then squeezed, to say  _ no hard feelings.  _ “Okay, let’s get the bin location for the warehouse.”

“Sure. You got a pencil?” Bucky asked, reaching for the tag on the headboard.

“A pencil? Get with the times, Barnes,” Steve said, moving his phone in to snap a picture. “See? Done,” he said, turning his face toward Hela just enough that Bucky wouldn’t see him wink in her direction. The immediate glee on Hela’s face was good, but the  _ full offense taken  _ look on Bucky’s was priceless. 

“When we get to the kitchen stuff, remind me to buy a bigger swear jar,” he said. “Speaking of which, where are my sons?”

“Go find them. We’ll catch up,” Steve said. 

Hela looked at him curiously as he sat down on the foot of the display bed. “Hey,” he said, “that was good, what you just did.”

“What? It’s just a bed. And you guys were driving me crazy.”

“See, the thing is, sometimes arguments are about more than what you see on the surface. We were both going around in circles and we needed somebody to snap us out of it. And you found us an option that everybody could live with.”

“Thanks,” Hela muttered, looking grouchy and pleased at the same time. Steve wouldn’t have expected a death goddess to sound shy about her leadership potential. “So can we go, or—”

“Hang on.” Steve patted the bed, and Hela sat down beside him, bemused. “I know everybody says teenagers are always on their phones these days, but you’re not usually as glued to yours as you are today. I understand that you’ve gotta be bored out of your mind, shopping with us old people, but are things okay otherwise?”

Hela stared at him for several seconds. Then she said, “Oh my God, Steve, are you trying to do your PSA about cyber-bullying?”

“No! God, no. I mean, first off, I never want to  _ think  _ about those things again. I just wanted to check in, make sure everything was all right. If you say they are, I’ll believe you. If they’re not, you can talk to me if you want to.” 

Steve stood up, ready to move on. Hela, to his surprise, didn’t. “I just, um,” she said, and looked down, letting her hair fall over her face like a curtain. “Morgan said she was gonna text me this morning. And now it’s almost three and she never did.”

“Oh,” Steve said, and sat down again. It had been a hell of a long time since he was a lovestruck teenager, but some things never really left a person, even after a hundred years. “Well, I think she’s probably just distracted,” he said. “You know how your Uncle Tony gets when he’s doing a project. Back when we all lived in the Tower, he used to disappear into his lab sometimes and I literally wouldn’t see him for days. We eventually figured out that it was our job to drag him out and make him eat something, and then he wouldn’t believe us when we told him what time it was.”

“Yeah, Morgan’s like that too,” Hela admitted. “She’s not as bad as Uncle Tony, though.”

“Nobody’s as bad as your Uncle Tony. You could text her, you know.”

“No! Then she’d know I was waiting for it. Dad says you have to play it cool when you like somebody and not like, scare them off.”

“Hela,” Steve said, “there’s so much I could tell you about how that approach does or doesn’t work depending on the situation. Your dad’s right that you don’t want to be texting your crush every two minutes, but take it from the world champion of  _ not  _ making a move soon enough—at this point, it’s probably okay to check in. I guarantee it’s not because she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“What if she _ doesn’t, _ though?”

“Oh, she does. Trust me, Hela, she probably feels as nervous about talking to you as you do about talking to her.” He grinned at her disbelieving expression. “I know Morgan isn’t exactly shy, but you are a space princess, after all.”

“Agh,” Hela said. “Please tell me you’re not gonna start saying space-everything now too, Steve. Dad’s bad enough.” Then she caught him completely off guard by throwing her arms around him and hugging him, very quickly, before she bounced up and went off in pursuit of Bucky and her brothers. 

Steve let her go on ahead, because he needed a minute to think. He was too new at this whole parenting game to feel confident about anything yet, but he was pretty sure that, in the absence of bodily harm, Bucky would tell him to let the kids figure things out on their own. Then again, Bucky hadn’t exactly stuck to a policy of non-interference in Steve’s romantic life back in the day. It wasn’t until he asked himself what his mother would do that the answer came clear, and he fired off a quick text of his own before getting up and following the rest of the family out of Bedrooms and into Home Storage.

When he realized what was happening there, he strongly considered turning around and walking right back into Bedrooms again, but Bucky spotted him and called him over loudly enough that he couldn’t claim plausible deniability. “And it’s a good thing your dad is so charming,” he found himself telling Thor, once he’d been rescued, “or we would’ve had to pay for the damage.”

“I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with me charming anybody and everything to do with the store manager deciding he could get a lot of mileage out of telling Corporate this story,” Bucky said, “but Steve is right about one thing: you lucked out on that one, kiddo, because it would’ve taken a  _ lot  _ of chores for you to pay that off. I know you weren’t trying to get stuck, but what possessed you to climb up there in the first place?”

_ “You _ said to help you look for Loki!” Thor said, all wounded dignity. “I was looking! I just got up high so I could see—”

“Okay, okay, fine. It was my fault that I forgot you don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe yet and didn’t tell you not to climb any displays and then get trapped in one,” Bucky agreed. “Now, please, for the love of all that’s holy, let’s go down to the warehouse and get the bed before anything else happens.”

“Dad, I’m hungry,” said Loki. “Can we get a snack?”

Bucky turned, and Steve watched him debate asking where Loki been during the whole cabinet fiasco and consciously decide against it. As Loki’s co-parent, he could understand that there were some things Bucky didn’t want to know. “Of course you’re hungry,” he said, resigned. “It’s been, what, two whole hours since lunch? You want some more meatballs? It’s a yes or no question, Loki, you can spare me the theatrical gagging.”

_ “No,  _ I don’t want animal balls. I want chicken nuggets. They have them upstairs, Dad, please?”

“Take him back to the cafe,” Steve said, smothering a laugh. “You can explain to him how meatballs are actually made over another cup or ten of coffee. I’ll go down to the warehouse and start loading up the bed.”

“I take it all back, Steve; you are the love of my life and light of my existence,” Bucky said fervently. 

“You mean I’m the enabler of coffee?”

“Isn’t that what I said? Anyway, Thor, are you also hungry?—Of course you are, you’re breathing. How about you, Hela?”

“Can I go help Steve instead? I don’t really wanna be involved in the meatball thing.”

“If you’re volunteering to haul boxes, kiddo, I’m not gonna stop you,” Bucky said, so it was just Steve and Hela walking toward the stairs when Hela’s phone dinged. She looked at the screen and let out the kind of squeak that only dogs and super-soldiers could hear, and Steve grinned at her. “Go find a place to sit and answer her, and catch up to me downstairs when you’re done,” he said, and he left her perched on one of the display chairs and went on his own down to the warehouse.

Bucky had explained the principles of how Ikea worked to him: you made a note of the bin location of what you wanted, and you used the number to find your item flat-packed in a box, waiting for you to take it home for assembly. Steve was fine with the concept, but he wasn’t sure he was ever going to get used to the sheer volume of  _ things _ a store could contain in the future. Once he’d gotten his bearings, he got a dolly from the rack near the door, wheeled it to the aisle noted on the Nordli bed’s tag, and stripped off the button-down he had on over his T-shirt, carefully draping it over the dolly’s handle so it wouldn’t get dirty, before he got to work. 

He’d gotten two of the three boxes loaded, and was looking for the third, when he heard a thump from the next aisle and a muffled curse in a woman’s voice. He stuck his head around the end of the aisle and found a couple of girls—young women, he guessed, maybe college-aged or a little older; the thing about being a hundred and nine-ish years old was that you really did lose your sense of how people aged normally—staring in dismay at a long, heavy-looking box that had just slid off the shelves and onto the floor rather than onto their dolly. “You ladies need a hand?” he asked, without thinking.

“No, we—” the shorter of the two girls began, and stopped when the other one elbowed her in the ribs, hard. 

“Yes, kind random stranger in the Red Hook Ikea today, we two young people who’ve spent the last four years sitting in college libraries and  _ not  _ going to the gym could really use some help lifting this dresser,” she said firmly, and Steve grinned and moved forward to pick up one end. The shorter girl jumped to help, and Steve recognized the stubborn glint in her eye all too well, so he let her take the other end and made sure he got most of the weight as they maneuvered the box onto the dolly. “There you go,” he said. “Need anything else?”

“We’re good, thanks,” the shorter one said, at the same instant the taller one said, “We’re getting the whole bedroom set, actually,” and Steve carefully didn’t smile at the way the shorter one hissed,  _ “Carolyn!”, _ and looked at Steve like she wanted to crawl behind the boxes and hide.

“So you must work out,” Carolyn said, flashing Steve a brilliant smile, and Steve was not born yesterday, thank you, and was pretty nearly immune to flattery about the muscles that came out of a bottle, but he would’ve had to be made of stone not to find the two of them adorable. “Show me what else you need,” he said, and Carolyn-and-Friend had a rapid conversation in microexpressions before the friend glowered briefly and yielded, which wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory for Steve, either.

Most of the pieces required by Carolyn and her friend, who turned out to be an Emma, were miraculously all within a few aisles of each other, so Steve had no idea he was attracting any particular attention until he looked up and found Bucky watching him from the end of the aisle, with crossed arms and a stern expression. “God, Rogers, the shirt thing, really? You’re  _ shameless,”  _ he said, and at the corners of Steve’s vision, a number of other shoppers scattered, suddenly fascinated by bin numbers and endcaps. 

_ Shit.  _ As soon as he realized quite how much of himself was on display through the T-shirt, Steve knew he was blushing and hated himself for it. “Hey, Buck,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could manage. “These are Carolyn and Emma. They just graduated and they’re setting up their first apartment. Carolyn’s got her first teaching job and Emma does—what was it?”

“Javascript programming,” said Emma, who’d thawed a little after Steve singlehandedly loaded her new set of glass-doored bookcases onto the dolly.

“Well, Teacher Carolyn and Javascript Programmer Emma, I happen to be Steve’s husband, so don’t get any ideas,” Bucky said, and Steve really would’ve laughed at the idea that Bucky could still even pretend to get jealous of him after all this time if he hadn’t made himself busy sliding the last box onto the dolly. “There you go,” he said, “it was nice meeting you both,” and after the girls finished thanking him profusely and got their overloaded dolly rolling toward checkout, he said, “You seem a lot more alive all of a sudden. Do I want to know how much coffee you had this time?”

“No, but  _ I  _ would like to know why Tony just texted me a screed about how he didn’t realize he was distracting Morgan from her social life with—I dunno, there’s a bunch of technobabble about whatever she was helping him with. But the upshot is that Morgan and Pepper are both mad at him now, and do you want to tell me why he’s yelling at me that I should, quote, ‘control my man’?”

“I just told Pepper she might want to ask Morgan if there was anything she’d meant to do today,” Steve shrugged. “Tony seems to be the one who’s making it a thing.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “I still don’t know what this is about, but you sound so much like your ma right now that I’m not sure I want to.”

“I’m taking that as a compliment. Where are your children?”

“Sitting very still where I left them right outside the warehouse and not getting into any trouble, if they know what’s good for them. Which they don’t, so I should probably go get them before they set the store on fire. You ready to check out?”

“Just a couple more boxes to load,” Steve said, and the look Bucky gave him was withering enough that he added, “You know, maybe we should rethink this bed thing. I’m pretty sure I like you better when you’re too sleep-deprived to make speeches at me.”

“And whose fault is that, I’d like to know.”

“Uh, I’d say it was yours, Mister ‘it’s not like the bed can get any more broken.’”

“You’re right. I have no regrets,” Bucky said, and that was when Loki dashed past them, with Thor hot on his heels, screaming about the maiming he had planned for his brother in exquisite detail. Even though that happened at least twice a day, Bucky still had to go attend to that situation before it resulted in actual property damage.

Steve went back to his own dolly and loaded the last carton of bedframe parts, and then, in deference to Bucky’s tender sensibilities, he did put the button-down shirt back on over the tee. He didn’t button it, though. If Bucky was going to accuse him of showing off, might as well do something to earn it.

When Inga’s phone dinged with a text message reading “4:30 Bay 1,” she quickly made arrangements with her co-greeter to cover the door and headed out the back for her break. Nichole, Sora, and Oliver were already in the parking lot when she arrived, lounging around the otherwise vacant loading dock; Oliver was the only one who still smoked, but they’d all been hired around the same time and gone through orientation together, and even though Nichole had been promoted to managing the kitchen showcase and wasn’t really one of the grunts anymore, the shared afternoon smoke-and-bitch break format was too important to give up.

“Stories!” Oliver yelled at her as she approached. It was another of the gang’s little rituals: every so often someone would declare a story contest, with hotly contested bragging rights going to whoever’d had the weirdest, or funniest, or worst thing happen on their watch. Inga grinned at him, because for once, she had one that was actually funny instead of horrible.

“Okay,” she said, perching on the edge of the ramp and catching the bag of chips Sora tossed at her—God bless the cafeteria discount. “Earlier today, I had a kid who was probably seven or eight years old walk up to me and ask me where the beds were because his dads had broken theirs, and I quote, ‘doing sex stuff.’” 

Sora let out a squeal that she muffled with her hand a little too late, making Nichole lean away from her and roll her eyes. “Were the dads there?”

“Yes, and I don’t know which of them wanted to sink through the floor and disappear more,” Inga said, tearing open the bag. “Well, that’s not true. One of them turned an unbelievable shade of red, but he was kind of doing that choking-laughing thing, and the other one just had a look like he was really sorry he’d decided to be honest with his children.”

“This didn’t happen to be kind of a stocky little blonde boy with real big blue eyes, did it?” Nichole asked, while Oliver was still busy whooping with laughter.

“No, he was a little bitty dark-haired kid who looked like a good stiff breeze would blow him away. Might’ve had a blonde kid with him, but I didn’t really pay attention to the one who wasn’t humiliating his folks. Why?”

“Because the stocky little blonde boy,” Nichole said portentously, “was the one who trapped himself in one of the kitchen displays two hours ago. And lest you think I’m talking about the lower cabinets, no, my friends, I do mean he somehow got stuck in the  _ top  _ of a Sektion unit.”

Inga shook her head. “How did he even get in there?”

“Climbed, I assume. What interests me is how the hell he managed to lock himself in a cabinet that  _ doesn’t have a lock.” _

“Got the door stuck,” said Sora, who was sometimes painfully inclined to be the voice of logic. “Closed it too hard and bent something, or got a corner of his clothes wedged in.”

Nichole shook her head. “I know from stuck doors, Sora. You’d been there, you would’ve sworn this one was locked, not jammed. This kid was also with his dads, is why I asked, and one of them wound up yanking the cabinet door off its hinges to get him unstuck.”

“Holy shit,” said Oliver, although it was halfhearted enough that Inga suspected he was only half-listening to everybody else’s tales until he got to tell his own. “You charge ’em for the damage?”

“Are you kidding? The whole time I was practically having a panic attack, waiting for one of them to start talking lawsuits. I  _ can’t  _ lose this job right now. Thank God, when I called Michael over to show him, the two guys kept apologizing for the kid and made a big deal out of thanking me for helping, and Michael didn’t really have a choice but to let it go.” Nichole exhaled from the bottom of her lungs, still in the process of letting go of the residual stress. “Lucky for all of us, after he calmed down and made sure the kid was okay, Michael decided the whole thing was hilarious. He’s gonna call Corporate and bitch them out about sending us shitty malfunctioning display cabinets. Ask me in a week or two and I’ll probably think it was funny too, but somebody else go next, because I don’t want to think about this any more today.”

“I will,” Sora said. “I’m pretty sure I rang up an order for a real-life cryptid today.”

“Do tell,” said Oliver, still trying to move this process along.

“A guy came through the line whose lunch tray was just fifteen cups of black coffee.”

“Sora,” Inga said, “if anybody else said that, you’d be the first person to say he was buying it for a group.”

“I thought of that,” Sora said, unruffled. “But he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I have children, ring up my coffee.’ He said  _ my;  _ I noticed. I actually wondered if I should get him to sign a waiver or something. But that’s not even the good part. The good part is that about half an hour ago, he came back with the kids to get them a snack, and he got  _ another. Dozen. Cups. Of coffee.  _ And this time I watched and saw that he actually drank them.”

“That is  _ not  _ an amount of coffee humans can survive,” Nichole said.

“Um, beg to differ,” Inga said. “I used to go through an awful lot of coffee during finals. Hey, what’d Coffee Dad look like?”

“Mm, white guy, longish hair, mid-thirties, absolutely poured into a really flattering pair of jeans. Why?”

“Oh my God,” Inga said again. “That sounds exactly like my guy who looked like he was regretting all the life choices that led up to his having kids.”

“Well, kids are exhausting,” Sora agreed. “What’s wrong, Nikki?”

Nichole had doubled over, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. “No,” she said. “No way. There’s no possible way it could all be the same guy.”

“The guy with the cabinet? You said it was a different kid.”

“Sora said he had kids, plural. And no, the guy who pulled the door off was a big guy with sort of blondeish hair, but the guy who took the kid out of the cabinet and immediately started lecturing him was definitely a long-haired white guy with amazing thighs.”

Oliver’s mouth was twitching. Inga sensed his internal conflict—he hated being upstaged, but in the end he pulled up a photo on his phone and passed it to Nichole. “Were these the guys, Nikki?”

“That’s them,” she said, taking the phone and passing it to Sora, who also nodded as she handed it to Inga.

“That is definitely them,” Inga said. “This is crazy. It’s like we all had encounters with a family of fae or something.”

“Not fae,” Oliver said, and that quickly, his undisguised glee was back again. “Legends, though. See, that guy with the brownish-blondeish hair who’s standing next to your local embarrassed coffee parent? That’s fucking Captain America.”

_ “What.” _ Nichole grabbed the phone again and stared at it, and just as quickly, Inga grabbed it back. In the end they wound up clustered around it while Inga zoomed in on the screen. “Okay, there’s kind of a resemblance,” she admitted—she’d been an admirer of the guy back in the day, just like every other red-blooded American teenager who had any inclination toward men at all. “But that can’t be Cap, Oliver. Everybody knows he died like nine years ago.”

Oliver shrugged. “Faked his death, baby. I would, if I was him. People kept sending me to fight space monsters, I’d get as far away from the whole thing as I could and find some gorgeous himbo to shack up with, too. Go to the next picture if you don’t believe me; you can see his abs in that one.”

Inga did, and zoomed in, and then looked some more. “He does have the right shape,” she admitted. “Big shoulders, skinny waist—”

“Yeah, we used to call him America’s favorite Dorito,” Nichole agreed, tracing a triangle shape over the photo with her finger. It wasn’t the abs that proved Oliver’s point, though; it was the fact that he appeared to be solo-lifting a flat-packed bookcase, and not even breaking a sweat about it. “It wasn’t as obvious when he had something on over the T-shirt, and the face is a little older—”

“Because it’s been almost ten years—”

“—But, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, Oliver might actually be onto something here. Probably wouldn’t have gone over too well if Captain America himself had just ditched the Avengers and married some dude. There were still people who got really worked up over gay marriage back then—”

“Regret to inform you that the bigots, while hopefully a dying breed, are still very much with us today, Nikki.”

“—But if it is Steve Rogers—and I’m not saying it  _ is,  _ just  _ if _ —then who  _ is  _ the guy he’s with? Is  _ he  _ some kind of superhero too? Because,” Nichole said thoughtfully, “that would definitely explain how he survived the coffee.”

“Captain America fakes his death to marry his super-lover,” Sora sighed, so uncharacteristically wistful that the rest of them looked at her in surprise. “What?” she said. “I don’t know if it’s really him, but how awesome would that be? I bet the other one used to be a supervillain or something, before he fell in love with his arch-nemesis and wound up with kids and furniture.”

“And our Sora is secretly a hopeless romantic under that hard practical exterior. Who knew?”

“Shut up, Oliver. And text me those photos or I will straight-up murder you,” said Sora, and nobody questioned whether she meant it.

On the other side of the building, and blissfully unaware that he was in the process of becoming a mythical figure who would be talked about for decades in the break room of the Red Hook Ikea, Bucky was pushing a dolly (loaded with the flat-packed bed, Steve’s easel, yet another unnecessary blanket that he’d thrown in the cart as an impulse buy, and way too many miscellaneous kitchen items) toward the car. “So yeah, I’m willing to admit that we survived that with only minor disasters,” he told Steve, who was already looking smug about their success, “but you do realize the project’s only halfway over, because we still have to get home and build the thing.”

“I’ll help!” said Thor. “I have a hammer.”

“Can we get ice cream on the way home?” Loki asked. 

“Loki, you cannot seriously be hungry agai—” Bucky sighed. “No, we’re not stopping for ice cream, because we have food at home and it would ruin your dinner. And what happened to the imminent moose threat that you were so worried about a couple hours ago?”

“At this point I’m assuming the house has already been infiltrated and I have to think of it as acceptable losses.” 

“Right. I’m officially never asking Fury to babysit you again,” Bucky was saying, when several things happened at once: At the very same moment that Hela unexpectedly squeaked and did a little hop, clutching her phone to her chest, one of the boxes slid over and crashed off the dolly, perilously close to Thor’s foot. Thor hopped back, knocking Loki over, and Loki, naturally, grabbed Thor and pulled him down with him, setting off the usual amount of punching and rolling and shrieking and chaos.

With the wordless cooperation of decades, Bucky sighed and moved to separate the boys, leaving Steve to deal with the boxes. “Nice job, punk,” he said, when he had one child’s collar in each hand and they couldn’t do much more than swing at each other ineffectually. “Good to know I still can’t trust you to stack boxes in a pile without it turning into a disaster.”

“My stacking was fine, thanks; I’m pretty sure it was the guy pushing the dolly who caused the problem,” Steve said, stepping aside to let Bucky see the damage. The corner of the box was a little crushed, but the frame itself was barely scratched; it was rare for anything in the house to last fifteen minutes without getting more banged up than that. “Hela, you okay? What was that noise about?”

“Nothing, I was just startled when the thing started falling,” Hela said, and Bucky had been a parent for long enough to know, first, when one of his children was telling a bald-faced lie and, second, which ones it wasn’t worth confronting them on. He just nodded and motioned for Steve to grab the other end of the box, waiting, and once he was too busy to look at her, she added, with deeply suspicious casualness, “By the way, Dad, can I go over to Uncle Tony’s tonight after dinner? Morgan says our class schedules are up online and we wanna figure out what classes we have together.”

“Sure, if Pepper says it’s okay and you’re not out too late,” Bucky said. “You should be fine to walk over after dinner, but call me and I’ll come pick you up when you’re ready to leave, okay? I don’t want you alone in the woods after dark.”

“I could take Fenris,” Hela countered. “He’ll keep me safe walking home.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’d be fine, kiddo, but how about we don’t subject Tony and Pepper to having quite that much Asgardian wolfdog fur in their house, okay?”

“Take the win, Hela,” Steve advised, in a low murmur. Loki was also subvocalizing something in a skeptical tone, although the only audible word was  _ moose. _

“Okay, fine,” Hela pretended to grumble, but Bucky saw how quickly she scooted into the car to text Morgan back, and he looked up and met Steve’s eyes to give him a little smile. Parenthood was turning him into a giant fucking sap, but there were worse problems to have. And from the look Steve returned, he suspected he wasn’t the only one looking forward to giving the bed a good long test once it was assembled. There was probably going to be as much coffee in his future tomorrow as there’d been today, but sometimes the alternating jitters and caffeine crashes were worth it.

Inside the box, securely roped to the top of the van, there was a creak as the fragments of wood in the bedframe settled down again. Its brief attempt to reach toward the light had barely outlasted the split-second burst of happy magic that hit it, but just for a moment, through layers of chipboard and glue, it had remembered what it was like to be a tree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did Loki use magic to lock Thor in a non-locking cabinet? He's not telling. Well, not telling anyone but Aunt Natasha.


End file.
